Calendar of Literary Facts

1859

  • Abolitionist John Brown leads a raid on the Federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia
  • Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins is born
  • Harriet E. Adams Wilson publishes Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There. By “Our Nig”
  • Charles Dickens publishes A Tale of Two Cities
  • The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia is published in a translation by Edward FitzGerald
  • Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species
  • The War of National Unification is fought in Italy
  • Knut Pederson (Knut Hamsun) is born (August 4)
  • Verner von Heidenstam is born (July 6)
  • Henri Bergson is born (October 18)
  • Arthur Conan Doyle is born (May 22)
  • Irving Bacheller is born (September 26)
  • A. E. Housman is born (March 26)
  • Washington Irving dies (November 28)
  • Leigh Hunt dies (August 28)